5 megapixel camera phone with flash
This is the first camera phone I’ve seen so far that looks plausible for general photography. The Samsung SPH-V7800 has a 5 megapixel sensor, 3x optical zoom and a built-in flash, along with other standard point-and-shoot features. (via Engadget)
This phone is probably too large for me personally to carry around. But it would also be nice to see a built in flash with the more common fixed focus camera phones, to turn them into digital equivalents of the disposable film cameras. A 1 megapixel camera is perfectly adequate for snapshots, but without a flash they’re nearly useless indoors and in the evening.
I suspect that the experience is more like carrying a camera around all the time rather than a phone. If you’re already carrying a phone and a camera this would eliminate one device. Given the design tradeoff (bulk, short battery life) assumed for this device, it would be interesting to see if a future version could include GPS and/or cell phone based location information, since the power requirements of a GPS chipset probably wouldn’t make quite as large a dent in the power budget / run time / cost of this device as a “normal” phone. We probably won’t get the chance to try these in the US for a while, though, this looks like it’s targeted for the Korean CDMA (EV-DO) market, it could make its way to Sprint or Verizon eventually.
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